This week’s Look, which shows an image from the International Center for Photography’s new show probably should never have happened. The photos were classified, then declassified, then stored in someone’s basement, nearly destroyed in a house fire, almost discarded, then separated, accidentally discarded, recovered and, finally, reunited. In 2006, the entire set was brought to the I.C.P.

The story of the photographs’ circuitous journey, from the basement of the original owner, Robert L. Corsbie, until now, is told by the filmmaker and writer Adam Harrison Levy in “Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945,” beginning with their discovery in 2000 by a Massachusetts diner owner named Don Levy (no relation):

One rainy night in Watertown, Massachusetts, a man was taking his dog for a walk. On the curb, in front of a neighbor’s house, he came across a pile of trash: old mattresses, cardboard boxes, a few broken lamps. In the heap of garbage he spotted a battered suitcase. He bent down and pulled it out. He turned the suitcase over and popped the clasps.

Inside he found a jumble of black-and-white photographs, some bent and broken, of devastated buildings, twisted girders, and blasted bridges — images of a ruined city. He quickly snapped the clasps closed, tucked the suitcase under his arm, and hurried home.

Back within the safety of his kitchen, he switched on the light. Rain was starting to thrum on the windows. He gently laid the suitcase down on the kitchen table and popped the clasps. This time he shuffled through the contents with more care. After a few minutes he was convinced of what he had suspected out on the street. He was looking at something he had never seen before: the effects of the first use of the atomic bomb. The man was looking at Hiroshima.

Fast-forward six years, when Levy mentioned the cache to an interested customer, who suggested that Levy show his photographs to a New York City gallery curator named Andrew Roth. As Levy puts it, Roth “had a reputation for putting on exhibitions of unusual photography,” and did as advertised: he put on an exhibition in 2003.

The author (who had become aware of the photos through Roth’s exhibition), contacted the diner owner and helped him investigate the origin of the photos. With just the address of the house in front of which the suitcase was found, they combed through records at City Hall found the contact information for a man named Marc Levitt. Adam Harrison Levy picks up the story:

The voice on the other end of the line shook with shock. “The photographs? Of Hiroshima? You have them? I thought they were in my basement! How did you get them?”

After an explanation, the voice was still quaking with disbelief. “This is wild! I must have thrown them out by accident when I was moving stuff out of the house. Or I left them by accident and the new owners threw them away. I never would have purposefully dumped those photographs. I’ve been carrying them around with me since 1972!”

The voice eventually calmed down. “Look. I think I might have more in the basement of my house. I’m sure of it. I’ll call you back in ten minutes.”

The phone rang a few minutes later. “Yeah, I have more. I’ll drop by the diner in an hour and show them to you.”

Six hours later, Marc Levitt entered the diner carrying two large oblong pieces of cardboard held together with black electrical tape. He seemed jumpy and a little anxious as he pulled back the brittle tape. A musty smell of mold and damp drifted up from about thirty 20×10 black-and-white prints, some of which were marked “Top Secret” and “Restricted.” They were aerial reconnaissance photos, clearly labeled Hiroshima, taken of the city before it was bombed (Figs. R.1–2).

“A little creepy, right?” Levitt said.

Levitt explained that he had gotten them years earlier when he and a college friend named Harlan Miller found them amid trash in the basement of Corsbie’s daughter, Nancy Mason, who had asked them to discard them, after they had barely survived her father’s house fire.

At last they’ve been reunited, for the betterment of the photos, and for the exhibition, but also for history. “They do have an elegiac quality to them,” the I.C.P. assistant curator Erin Barnett, who organized the exhibition, told me. “Because it was, after all, a victory. And we won. And yet …”

An earlier version of this post stated that the bombing of Nagasaki took place a week after the bombing of Hiroshima; it was three days later.

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…